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Quotes About New Love Biography

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At the end of 1989, David Foster Wallace was admitted to McLean Hospital, the psychiatric hospital associated with Harvard University, for substance addiction. He was twenty-seven years old and increasingly desperate for help. He had already experienced literary fame with his college novel, “The Broom of the System,” and sunk into obscurity with his postmodern short-story cabinet of wonders, “Girl with Curious Hair” (twenty-two hundred copies sold in hardcover). His most recent stop, as a graduate student in philosophy at Harvard, had lasted only a few weeks. His private life was hardly less uneven. He had attempted suicide the year before, in his family home, and had also gone from being a marijuana addict to an alcoholic, mostly drinking alone and in front of the television. Most dreadfully, he felt that he could no longer write well. He was unsure whether the problem was lack of focus, lack of material, or a lack of ambition. Granada House was to be the improbable solution to this problem, altering his approach to his work and putting him on the road to producing, in remarkably short order, his masterpiece, “Infinite Jest.”

The four weeks Wallace spent at McLean in November 1989 changed his life. This was not his first or most serious crisis, but he felt now as if he had hit a new bottom or a different kind of bottom. From the ashes to which he had reduced postmodernism a new sort of fiction was meant to arise, as he’d recently laid out in the essay “Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young.” How else to understand the love note to the reader at the end of “Westward,” the last story he’d successfully written? But instead of rebirth, a prolonged dying had followed, and for the past year the corpse had moldered. Wallace hadn’t even been able to finish a nonfiction piece without help since 1987. Never before had he worked so hard with so little to show for it.

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Wallace was placed in a facility for alcoholics and depressives, with a large room for twelve-step meetings. The medical staff interviewed Wallace and told him that he was a hard-core alcohol and drug user and that if he didn’t stop abusing both he would be dead by thirty. Wallace in turn reported the news to his college roommate and close friend Mark Costello, who came the next day. “I’m a depressive, and guess what?” Wallace said. “Alcohol is a depressant!” He smiled through his tears, as if, Costello remembers, he “was unveiling a fun surprise to a five-year-old.” It was of course information Wallace knew already.

The program was meant to shake up the addict, and, with Wallace, it succeeded. Pulling him out of his old life and keeping him away from its temptations and habits helped. In the end, though, what mattered most was probably that the intoxicated Wallace was no longer writing successfully, which left open the hope that a sober one might. Wallace saw a therapist and went to meetings. He detoxed from the alcohol. Bonnie Nadell, his longtime literary agent, who was back in the Northeast to be with her family for Thanksgiving, came by to see her author a few weeks after his admission. Wallace was already calmer by then. He met Nadell and a couple of other friends in a brightly lit room full of other patients, all smoking and drinking black coffee. Wallace looked so ragged that Nadell borrowed a pair of scissors from the staff and cut his hair. But she was happy to see he was writing in a notebook. McLean was the storied holding tank for many literary depressives, from Sylvia Plath to Robert Lowell, and it occurred to Wallace’s friends that this gave him at least some comfort, that he thought of himself as at a mental-health Yaddo.

It was Wallace’s expectation that he would go back to Harvard after his stay at McLean. He was, after all, still enrolled in the graduate program. But the psychiatric staff kept advising him against it. He did not recognize himself in their phrase “hard-core recidivist,” but as the weeks went by he felt farther and farther away from his old self and must have begun, amid his anxiety about writing, to concede the point that survival had to come first. In any event, he chose to go to a halfway house in Brighton run by a woman who had worked in a psychology lab funded by NASA before she herself went into rehab. He hoped she would understand what he saw as the particular problems of a person as intelligent and educated as himself and provide support. It would be the next best thing to McLean, which Wallace was—Costello noted—sorry to have to leave. He had gotten used to the routines—the meetings, the therapy, the order, the prepared meals—not entirely unlike home. Brighton was a world away from Cambridge, and he did not know what to expect. Despite having written a book on rap, his knowledge of anything other than middle-class academic life was minimal. He wrote Nadell at the end of November, “I am getting booted out of here and transferred to a halfway house…. It is a grim place, and I am grimly resolved to go there.”

Granada House was on the grounds of the Brighton Marine hospital near the Massachusetts Turnpike. Wallace found it funny that a “marine hospital” should be nowhere near water. He gives a good picture of its fictional counterpart in “Infinite Jest”:

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